This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  To my amazement, it all seemed to me curiously dim and elusive. I could not quite grasp what Zarentzov was trying to formulate.

  “Why,” I cried, “the thing is a monstrous fraud!” I went to the professor of Physics in the University I then attended, and I told him it was a fraud, a huge book of mere nonsense. He looked at me rather pityingly.

  “I am afraid, Modevski,” he said, addressing me by the name I was at the time using, “I am afraid you do not understand it, that is all. When your mind has broadened, you will. You should apply yourself more carefully to your Physics.” But that angered me, for I had mastered my Physics before he was ever born. I challenged him to explain the theory. And he did! He put it, obviously, in the clearest language he could. Yet I understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook his head impatiently, saying that it was useless, that if I could not grasp it I would simply have to keep on studying. I was stunned. I wandered away in a daze.

  For do you see what happened? During all those years I had studied ceaselessly, and my mind had been clear and quick as the day I first had left the hospital. But all that time I had been able only to remain what I was—an extraordinarily intelligent man of the twentieth century. And the rest of the race had been progressing! It had been swiftly gathering knowledge and power and ability all that time, faster and faster, while I had been only remaining still. And now here was Zarentzov and the teachers of the Universities, and, probably, a hundred intelligent men, who had all outstripped me! I was being left behind.

  And that is what happened. I need not dilate further upon it. By the end of that century I had been left behind by all the students of the world, and I never did understand Zarentzov. Other men came with other theories, and these theories were accepted by the world. But I could not understand them. My intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing more to understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing, and, thenceforth, I could only play wearily with the old ideas.

  MANY THINGS HAPPENED IN THE world. A time came when the East and West, two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up in arms: the civil war of a planet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It was all incomprehensible to me: like a bizarre dream, things happened, people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurked during all that time in a tiny shuddering hole under the city of Yokohama, and by a miracle I survived. And the East won. But it seems to have mattered little who did win, for all the world had become, in all except its few remaining prejudices, a single race, and nothing was changed when it was all rebuilt again, under a single government.

  I saw the first of the strange creatures who appeared among us in the year 6371, men who were later known to be from the planet Venus. But they were repulsed, for they were savages compared with the Earthmen, although they were about equal to the people of my own century, 1900. Those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth of their world, and those who were not killed by our hands, those few returned silently home again. And I have always regretted that I had not the courage to go with them.

  I watched a time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, when men could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men, these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tiny shriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements on their little conveyances. It was I, with my ancient compunctions, who shuddered when at last they put to death all the perverts, the criminals, and the insane, ridding the world of the scum for which they had no more need. It was then that I was forced to produce my tattered old papers, proving my identity and my story. They knew it was true, in some strange fashion of theirs, and, thereafter, I was kept on exhibition as an archaic survival.

  I saw the world made immortal through the new invention of a man called Kathol, who used somewhat the same method “legend” decreed had been used upon me. I observed the end of speech, of all perceptions except one, when men learned to communicate directly by thought, and to receive directly into the brain all the myriad vibrations of the universe.

  All these things I saw, and more, until that time when there was no more discovery, but a Perfect World in which there was no need for anything but memory. Men ceased to count time at last. Several hundred years after the 154th Dynasty from the Last War, or, as we would have counted in my time, about 200,000 A.D., official records of time were no longer kept carefully. They fell into disuse. Men began to forget years, to forget time at all. Of what significance was time when one was immortal?

  AFTER LONG, LONG UNCOUNTED CENTURIES, a time came when the days grew noticeably colder. Slowly the winters became longer, and the summers diminished to but a month or two. Fierce storms raged endlessly in winter, and in summer sometimes there was severe frost, sometimes there was only frost. In the high places and in the north and the sub-equatorial south, the snow came and would not go.

  Men died by the thousands in the higher latitudes. New York became, after awhile, the furthest habitable city north, an arctic city, where warmth seldom penetrated. And great fields of ice began to make their way southward, grinding before them the brittle remains of civilizations, covering over relentlessly all of man’s proud work.

  Snow appeared in Florida and Italy one summer. In the end, snow was there always. Men left New York, Chicago, Paris, Yokohama, and everywhere they traveled by the millions southward, perishing as they went, pursued by the snow and the cold, and that inevitable field of ice. They were feeble creatures when the Cold first came upon them, but I speak in terms of thousands of years; and they turned every weapon of science to the recovery of their physical power, for they foresaw that the only chance for survival lay in a hard, strong body. As for me, at last I had found a use for my few powers, for my physique was the finest in that world. It was but little comfort, however, for we were all united in our awful fear of that Cold and that grinding field of Ice. All the great cities were deserted. We would catch silent, fearful glimpses of them as we sped on in our machines over the snow—great hungry, haggard skeletons of cities, shrouded in banks of snow, snow that the wind rustled through desolate streets where the cream of human life once had passed in calm security. Yet still the Ice pursued. For men had forgotten about that Last Ice Age when they ceased to reckon time, when they lost sight of the future and steeped themselves in memories. They had not remembered that a time must come when Ice would lie white and smooth over all the earth, when the sun would shine bleakly between unending intervals of dim, twilight snow and sleet.

  Slowly the Ice pursued us down the earth, until all the feeble remains of civilization were gathered in Egypt and India and South America. The deserts flowered again, but the frost would come always to bite the tiny crops. For still the Ice came. All the world now, but for a narrow strip about the equator, was one great silent desolate vista of stark ice-plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of cities that had endured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was terrible to imagine the awful solitude and the endless twilight that lay on these places, and the grim snow, sailing in silence over all. . . .

  It surrounded us on all sides, until life remained only in a few scattered clearings all about that equator of the globe, with an eternal fire going to hold away the hungry Ice. Perpetual winter reigned now; and we were becoming terror-stricken beasts that preyed on each other for a life already doomed. Ah, but I, I the archaic survival, I had my revenge then, with my great physique and strong jaws—God! Let me think of something else. Those men who lived upon each other—it was horrible. And I was one.

  SO INEVITABLY THE ICE CLOSED in. . . . One day the men of our tiny clearing were but a score. We huddled about our dying fire of bones and stray logs. We said nothing. We just sat, in deep, wordless, thoughtless silence. We were the last outpost of Mankind.

  I think suddenly something very noble must have transformed these creatures to a semblance of what they had been of old. I saw, in their eyes, the question they sent from one to another, and in every eye
I saw that the answer was, Yes. With one accord they rose before my eyes and, ignoring me as a baser creature, they stripped away their load of tattered rags and, one by one, they stalked with their tiny shrivelled limbs into the shivering gale of swirling, gusting snow, and disappeared. And I was alone. . . .

  So am I alone now. I have written this last fantastic history of myself and of Mankind upon a substance that will, I know, outlast even the snow and the Ice—as it has outlasted Mankind that made it. It is the only thing with which I have never parted. For is it not irony that I should be the historian of this race—I, a savage, an “archaic survival?” Why do I write? God knows, but some instinct prompts me, although there will never be men to read.

  I have been sitting here, waiting, and I have thought often of Sir John and Alice, whom I loved. Can it be that I am feeling again, after all these ages, some tiny portion of that emotion, that great passion I once knew? I see her face before me, the face I have lost from my thoughts for eons, and something is in it that stirs my blood again. Her eyes are half-closed and deep, her lips are parted as though I could crush them with an infinity of wonder and discovery. O God! It is love again, love that I thought was lost! They have often smiled upon me when I spoke of God, and muttered about my foolish, primitive superstitions. But they are gone, and I am left who believe in God, and surely there is purpose in it.

  I am cold, I have written. Ah, I am frozen. My breath freezes as it mingles with the air, and I can hardly move my numbed fingers. The Ice is closing over me, and I cannot break it any longer. The storm cries weirdly all about me in the twilight, and I know this is the end. The end of the world. And I—I, the last man. . . .

  The last man. . . .

  . . . I am cold—cold. . . .

  But is it you, Alice? Is it you?

  N DAY

  — PHILIP LATHAM —

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  THIS IS AS CLOSE TO a detailed scientific report on the end of the world as we are likely to get, because “Philip Latham” was a pseudonym for R. S. Richardson, an astronomer who for twenty-five years was on the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory and, later, the Mount Palomar Observatory in Southern California, and in 1938 became Associate Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. He called on his astronomical knowledge to write about twenty short stories between 1946 and 1977, of which “N Day,” published in the January 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, was the first—a richly detailed account of the imminent end of the world as the sun goes nova, told calmly and quietly, a tale that very likely shows just the way such an event would be perceived and reacted to by a group of professional astronomers. If the ultimate catastrophe does indeed befall us, this is surely how someone much like Richardson’s narrator would set it down, step by step, for the benefit of readers who will never have the opportunity to read it.

  —R. s.

  N DAY

  — PHILIP LATHAM —

  TUESDAY, 1949 JANUARY 18

  SUNSPOT MAXIMUM AND THREE DAYS without a single spot!

  This cycle is certainly developing in a peculiar way. From the last minimum about March, 1944, sunspot activity jumped to a Wolf Number of 252 in December, 1948, the highest index on record since that rather dubious maximum back in 1778. But this month spots have simply failed to appear, as completely as if someone inside the sun had pulled a switch.

  Clarke’s elaborate empirical analysis has failed utterly to predict. I am now more firmly convinced than ever that no combination of harmonics can ever represent the approximate eleven-year rise and fall in the number of sunspots. Instead I favor Halm’s old idea that each cycle is a separate outburst in itself. The very fact that our star is a weak variable means it is to a certain degree unstable. Not unstable to the extent of a Cepheid variable but still—unstable. Indeed, Hahn’s hypothesis appeals to me more strongly now than when he announced it four cycles ago.

  There I go measuring my life in sunspot cycles again! But four cycles does sound much less than forty-four years. Yet how little more I know about the sun than when I first came to Western Tech. In many ways the sun reminds me of a woman: just when you think you are beginning to understand her, invariably she will fool you. Enough of that. What business does an old bachelor have writing such things in his diary?

  The driving clock on the coelostat was out of commission again today but I will have to repair it somehow. President Bixby refused my request for three hundred seventy-five dollars on the grounds that the budget was already over the limit. I notice, however, that others seem to have no trouble securing large allotments.

  Until some spots show up I suppose I can best employ my time testing those new Eastman IV-K plates that arrived today.

  EVENING

  WHEN I WROTE THIS MORNING that the sun invariably does the unexpected, I had no idea my words would be so soon fulfilled.

  Spent an hour this afternoon taking test plates on the solar spectrum in the yellow and orange. Imagine my astonishment upon examining one of the plates with an eyepiece to see the D3 line of neutral helium. Of course, D3 often shows above active sunspots, but I believe this is the first case of its appearance over a calm undisturbed region. Smedley would probably know about this but I dread to ask him. I know he regards me as an old fossil, and this would only be further proof of my growing senility. How different was my own attitude when I was a young instructor!

  The weather looked threatening at sunset but when I stepped out on the platform just now the sky was clear. The valley five thousand feet above was a carpet of lights from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. Better drive down for a haircut and fresh pipe tobacco soon—my two-week supply is nearly gone. I really shouldn’t stay on the mountain so long at a time. Too much solitude is as bad for the mind as too much inbreeding is bad for the race.

  Besides, I absolutely must get started on the notes Marley left behind. Publication of such valuable material should not be so long delayed.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19

  THE LONG QUIESCENT SPELL IN solar activity is broken at last, and how it was broken!

  An enormous spot is coming around the east limb, that should be an easy naked-eye object within a few days. Unable to get magnetic classification but feel sure from general appearance must be a gamma. Radio and television stations beware. They will be in for plenty of trouble soon.

  After the two direct shots of the sun, I switched the beam over for a look through the polarizing monochromator, just in time to catch a splendid surge. Near the big spot the sun was swollen up like a boil. Suddenly a long arm emerged from the protuberance moving at a velocity I estimated at one hundred fifty miles per second. After reaching out to about sixty thousand miles the filament paused uncertainly. Then it was withdrawn, as suddenly as it emerged.

  So often the sun conveys the feeling of life. At times it is like a sleeping monster, sluggish, dormant; at others, alive and tense, like a tiger crouched to spring.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 20

  IN ADDITION TO THE SPOT-GROUP that came around the limb yesterday, a fast-growing spot has broken out in heliographic latitude 42 N. This is the farthest I have ever seen a spot from the solar equator. Maunder at Greenwich speaks of “faint flecks” as high as latitude 72 but this is a large vigorous spot with a magnetic field strength of 2000 gauss.

  If the face of the sun is a strange sight when viewed directly, it is as nothing compared to its appearance when analyzed by the spectroscope. At 18 hours GCT photographed a broad bright wing projecting from the violet side of the red hydrogen line, presumably due to a streamer of gas spurting from the solar surface with a speed of around four hundred miles per second.

  Not so spectacular but much harder to believe, was the discovery of a faint bright line in the blue. Yesterday I expressed surprise at finding 5875, the yellow line of neutral helium, in the sun. Today I was positively shocked when I discovered that 4686 of ionized helium also showed faintly.

  I wonder if I should send a wire to Harvard? But I hesit
ate to take such a step. Perhaps I should check with Mount Wilson first. Yes, I will see if they have observed anything unusual. I hate to consult with Smedley on anything. How I wish Marley were here. He was always so sympathetic and understanding.

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 21

  APPARENTLY, I AM THE ONLY astronomer who has gotten a look at the sun recently.

  Talked with the Mount Wilson office in Pasadena this morning. They said there is six feet of snow on the mountain, with the power line out, and the road blocked by slides and boulders. The Atlantic coast reports storms all the way from Jacksonville to Montreal. And in Europe the tense political situation has paralyzed scientific research.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 22

  AFTER CLOUDS PUT A STOP to observations last Thursday, I drove down to the campus for a look at Marley’s notes. I found the box in my office where it had come all the way from Dunedin, New Zealand.

  What a great observer Marley was. And what a lucky observer! Three years in the southern hemisphere and three novae so far south he was the only one to get a complete photographic record. To think I had the same opportunity and turned it down. But somehow I was afraid to leave the old observatory here and venture into strange surroundings.

  Marley was one of the most uncommunicative men I have ever known. Whenever he had anything to say he said it in his notebook. Taking notes got to be a habit with him, just as keeping a diary is with me. He kept his notes on special forms which he had printed for that purpose and later bound them in black leather.

  Exploring the contents of the packing box was sad business. Here was the sum total of a man’s life work—a dozen leather-bound volumes, some reprints of his published papers, a box of plates taken at the coudé focus of the 60-inch, a worn account book, a few old letters and pictures. I feel guilty going through a man’s personal effects in this way, but that was Marley’s last wish.